


The First Step (Is Always The Hardest)

by Anndy



Category: Until Dawn (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Hospitals, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-24
Updated: 2016-12-24
Packaged: 2018-08-31 19:17:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8590462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anndy/pseuds/Anndy
Summary: Jess made it. Emily doesn't care. Really.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sumi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sumi/gifts).



> I hope you have a pleasant Yuletide!
> 
> The worldstate:  
> -Emily & Matt's relationship was good.  
> -Matt died when he fell off the cliff after attacking the herd.  
> -Emily didn't find the flare gun, was bitten but not shot.  
> -Jessica was alone in the mines.  
> -Sam found Hannah's journal.  
> -Everyone but Matt survived until dawn.

It’s past noon and they’ve all finished giving their statements to the sheriff when they get word that Jessica has been found alive.  
  
Not that Emily cares. But yeah, alive. A bit worse for wear, and she was flown directly to the hospital, but alive. Apparently she managed to start a small fire using some old oil lamp she found, and someone from the rescue helicopter saw the smoke and spotted her, huddled right next to the entrance to the mine.  
  
Jessica can count herself very lucky, Emily thinks, because empirical evidence has shown that the county’s search-and-rescue brigade is a _joke_. A whole year and they couldn’t find hide nor hair of the twins, and in one night of stumbling around, Emily has found a phone, a watch, a locket, a picture, a pair of glasses, a wall full of tally marks, a grave marker, and oh yeah, _Beth’s fucking head_. It would be funny if only the punch line weren’t so awful, because they could have saved Hannah. If someone had tracked the phone’s GPS signal, or even had some goddamn eyes, they could have noticed that the safety railing on the ranger path was damaged, as if by, say, a body falling over it, and if only they’d just looked at the bottom of the cliff… Hannah could have been saved. Sam says they’d had thirty days to save Hannah before - well, before.  
  
Now all that evidence (what Emily could carry of it in her pockets, anyway) is sitting in a safe at the sheriff’s office and some poor fucker will get to explain to Mr. and Mrs. Washington that their son is missing, probably dead, and one of their daughters turned into a wendigo, but at least the other is definitely dead, body and all, here, have some useless mementos.  
  
Better them than Emily. As it is, she’ll probably have to say something to Matt’s family. She was the last one to see him alive. She heard him scream as he fell down the cliff (the same cliff that killed Beth, doomed Hannah). She tries not to think about the _thud_ she heard when he hit the bottom. (She tries really hard not to think about the blood trail left behind as he was dragged off by must-have-been-the-wendigo. She hopes with all her heart that he was already dead by then.) How can she explain that he wasn’t killed by a psycho maniac, a flamethrower-wielding weirdo, or a supernatural man-eating creature, he was killed because he tried to intimidate a herd of deer and the deer won? (How can she explain that maybe she could have grabbed his hand and helped him up or something, but she was too scared to look until it was too late?)

* * *

  
Jessica looks terrible, lying pale and bruised in her hospital bed, sleeping the sleep of the doped up on pain medicine. (Emily hasn’t slept in thirty hours now, and the adrenaline has run out long ago, but every time she closes her eyes all she can see is the barrel of a gun pointing straight at her.) Her brows are furrowed and she twitches from time to time, like the monsters are stalking her even in her dreams. Emily doesn’t care, really she doesn’t, but damn if those claw marks on her face don’t look vicious, even from where she’s looking in through the glass outside her room.  
  
So much for Miss Homecoming. Mike doesn’t seem bothered though, judging from the twenty red roses at her bedside. The hypocrite, he swore Jess was dead, no let’s not bother looking, she’s 100% dead, of course I didn’t actually _check_ , I just _know_ , okay? But oops, turns out she was only mostly dead, so now the prick gets to play the gallant knight in shining armor after doing fuck all. Too bad he had to make do with a generic Get Well Soon card to go with his ridiculous bouquet, the hospital gift shop probably doesn’t carry any "Sorry I Left You For Dead In A Monster Infested Mine, Can We Still Fuck?" cards. What a prize.  
  
Oh, well. If Jessica wants the oaf, she’s welcome to him. Emily never wants to see either of them again. Really.

* * *

  
The hospital’s gift shop carries everything from books and magazines to baby clothes and toys to jewelry, and a ridiculous amount of floral arrangements, live or plastic, in baskets or in vases, with or without tiny plush animals. Emily scans the aisles desperately, hoping to find coffee, but that’s one thing they don’t carry, at least not in the hot, liquid form she wants. Her parents won’t be here to pick her up for hours, and she needs coffee, or else as soon as she sits down her eyes will close and she’ll be taken by dreams of that gun barrel (or worse, that _thud_ , or Beth’s unseeing eyes, or those horrible things that look almost human except no human moves like _that_ ). So she wanders on through the corridors, looking for a vending machine.  
  
Her shoulder still stings where the nurses disinfected her bite wound. ("Wow, was it a wolverine? I’ve never seen anything like this." Well, no shit.) They gave her a shot for rabies, fucking _rabies_. "Just to be sure", right. Probably just as well, it would be just her luck to survive being chased through a mine and nearly mauled by a wendigo (and being nearly shot by Testosterone Man, let us not forget that) only to die because wendigoes are plague vectors on top of everything else. Hurray for modern medicine.

* * *

  
After two right turns down a corridor, she finds Chris and Sam slumped in chairs on either side of a vending machine, cradling steaming cups of something, and Emily’s nose informs her that she’s found the Holy Grail. She really doesn’t want to deal with anyone right now, but what the hell, she doesn’t have the energy to go looking for another vending machine.  
  
"Hey," she greets them as she steps up to the machine. Chris manages a vague grunt in her direction, but Sam stays hunched over her cup, staring into the middle distance, looking for all the world like - like her best friend just died. "So what’s up?"  
  
Chris looks up slowly as Emily struggles with her pocket change. "I overheard a doctor talking to the sheriff. They brought the bodies in for analysis. You know, the. The three bodies from the lodge. And the doctor said, they did a DNA analysis and one of them is definitely Hannah. Well, he said it could be either of the twins, they took samples from the Washingtons last year just in case, he just didn’t understand why the DNA’s a match when the skeleton is all wrong. But we know, right? We know it was her. One of those things was her."  
  
The machine has finally disgorged Emily’s coffee into the paper cup. She takes an experimental sip, finds it scalding, and resigns herself to keeping the Gloom Brigade company for a while. So… Hannah. That’s so fucked up. Emily is quite sure she never could have recognized her literally to save her life. Which one was Hannah? The one dangling from the chandelier? The one that got its head ripped off?  
  
Presumably Hannah was the one with a butterfly tattoo on its arm, but Emily really wasn’t looking at the monsters’ arms as she stood there, torn between the instinct to _runlikehellrunrunrun_ and the knowledge she had to stay still as a statue if she wanted to live. What good would knowing do anyway, aside from satisfying morbid curiosity?  
  
When Sam speaks up, her voice sounds rusty, broken. "I killed Hannah. Me. I flipped the switch. I killed her."  
  
Yep. That would suck, if there was anything left of Hannah in that thing. Sure as hell didn’t seem that way. Maybe Hannah was even glad to be put out of her misery.  
  
(Emily wonders how she would feel if it were her and her best friend.)  
  
(Emily doesn’t have a best friend.)  
  
"Look, you... you couldn’t have known it was her," Chris informs his coffee.  
  
"But I think she recognized me," Sam goes on miserably. "One of them defended us from the others. That must have been her. She recognized our voices. She was trying to protect us. And I killed her."  
  
From where Emily had been cowering for her life, it had looked more like animals fighting over which one would get to feed first, but she knows better than to voice that sentiment. "Yeah, sure, it’s possible, I guess. But she wasn’t the only one in the lodge. Sam, you had no choice, it was them or us."  
  
"Emily’s right. You said it yourself, Hannah recognized you. She was protecting you. She… there was no coming back from what she d- what she was. But she wanted you to live. You… You have to remember that. Okay?"  
  
Sam is silent for a very long time. When she speaks again, she raises her head and looks at them for the first time. "When I ran for the door… they ran after me. I thought for sure they would catch me, but I heard this scuffle behind me. Hannah wouldn’t let the other one hurt me. That was the last thing she ever did: save me."  
  
If Hannah had recognized them at all, which Emily frankly doubts, she must have hated them. She would have wanted them to be terrified, she would have wanted them to suffer. Why would Sam have been an exception? For all Hannah knew Sam had betrayed her too. But Emily doesn’t say so. Contrary to popular belief, she isn’t heartless. She would never take away a drowning woman’s last hope.  
  
Emily’s coffee sits cold and untouched in her hands.

* * *

  
Emily is pacing in the lobby, back and forth, back and forth. She stops in front of the gift shop’s door. Her leg twitches. She wants to keep pacing, back and forth, back and forth. It’s the fifth time she’s stopped in front of the door without going in, people are starting to stare. She really has no reason to go in. She doesn’t owe anyone anything.  
  
…Fuck this.  
  
She pushes the door open and makes a beeline for the flower counter. "Hey, can I have this delivered to a room?" She points at the smallest arrangement that can still qualify as a bouquet.  
  
"Sure thing, which room?"  
  
"Two four seven," Emily says. (She didn't have to think about it.)  
  
"Card?"  
  
"No card," she says firmly, and fuck the florist if she thinks Emily's weird because of that. Her gaze is still lingering over the display. "But, um..." She hesitates over the knick-knacks littering the shelves. One of them has caught her eye. (It's just the kind of thing that Jess...) "You know what? Throw in this plushie too."  
  
Jess always liked teddy bears.

 


End file.
